Editorial in New York Times
When members of Mi Familia Vota, a Latino group, were registering voters
recently on a Miami Beach sidewalk outside a building where new citizens were
being sworn in, the Homeland Security Department ordered them to stop. The
department gave all kinds of suspect reasons, which a federal court has since
rejected, but it looked a lot as if someone at Homeland Security just didn't
want thousands of new Latino voters on the Florida rolls.
The suppression of minority votes is alive and well in 2004, driven by the
sharp partisan divide across the nation. Because many minority groups vote
heavily Democratic, some Republicans view keeping them from registering and
voting as a tactic for victory - one that has a long history in American
politics. It is rarely talked about publicly, but John Pappageorge, a Republican
state legislator from Michigan, recently broke the taboo. He was quoted in The
Detroit Free Press as saying, "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're
going to have a tough time in this election cycle." Detroit's population is more
than 80 percent black.
A recent report by the N.A.A.C.P. and People for the American Way includes
page after page of examples of how this shabby business works. On Election Day,
"ballot security" teams head for minority neighborhoods. They demand that voters
produce identification when it is not required, take photographs of voters and
single out immigrant voters for special scare tactics.
Two years ago in the governor's race in Maryland, leaflets appeared in
Baltimore saying that before voters showed up at the polls, they had to pay off
all parking tickets and overdue rent. The same year in Louisiana, fliers were
distributed in African-American areas to tell voters, falsely, that if they did
not want to vote on Election Day, they could still vote three days later.
What is particularly discouraging this year is the degree to which government
officials have been involved in such efforts. In South Dakota's hard-fought
statewide Congressional race, poll workers turned away Native American voters
who could not provide photo identification, which many of them do not have, even
though the law clearly says identification is not required. In one heavily
Native American county, the top elections official, who is white, wrote out
instructions saying no one could vote without photo identification. In Texas, a
white district attorney threatened to prosecute students at Prairie View A&M, a
large, predominantly African-American campus, if they registered to vote from
the school, even though they are entitled to by law.
And in Florida, the secretary of state, Glenda Hood, had a list prepared to
purge felons from the voter rolls; the list had many errors and would have
turned away an untold number of qualified black voters. She abandoned the list
only when news organizations sued to make it public, then pointed out its many
inaccuracies.
In addition to these blatant forms of vote suppression, elections officials
have been adopting policies that appear neutral on their face but often have the
effect, and perhaps the intent, of disproportionately disenfranchising
minorities. With huge registration drives under way among minorities in swing
states, some secretaries of state have adopted bizarrely rigid rules for new
registrations.
In Florida, Ms. Hood is insisting that thousands of registration forms on
which a citizenship box is not checked are invalid, even though elsewhere on the
forms each applicant has sworn that he or she is a citizen. In Ohio, Secretary
of State Kenneth Blackwell was insisting until recently that any registration
form that came in on anything less than 80-pound paper stock had to be rejected.
The continued disenfranchisement of convicted felons in many states also has an
unmistakable racial component.
The suppression of minority votes has continued because it is perceived as a
winning tactic, and because it is rarely punished. This needs to change.
Trying to prevent members of minorities from voting can be a violation of
federal and state law. Election officials, poll watchers and voters should be on
the lookout for vote suppression, and should report it. And prosecutors should
look for criminal cases to pursue. A few high-profile prosecutions of political
operatives, and even elections officials, would go a long way toward ending a
disgraceful American tradition.
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